Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Sparrow pushed his way around the candy man. The vendor tried to interest people in the fantastical shapes he created by pulling sugar syrup, he made words and even the heads of famous figures. Sparrow had loved these sweets when he was a boy. He bought three, one that seemed to be in the shape of Chairman Mao, another that was clearly Beethoven, and a third unidentifiable. He pushed his way through the crowd.

Home at last, he could smell the starchy sweetness of the rice Ai-ming had prepared. His daughter had already laid out pickled turnips and spicy eggplant. On radios and speakers up and down the hutong, the government verdict on the the student demonstrations repeated: This is a serious political struggle confronting the whole Party and People….The announcer let it be known that the editorial would appear in People’s Daily the following morning, April 26, and the Party urged all citizens to study it carefully. Sparrow thought he must ask Ai-ming to design a device that surreptitiously turned off other people’s radios.

A translation of the Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky sat on the television. Why in the world was Ai-ming reading this? He turned its thin pages. He couldn’t concentrate on the words but in the photos, he observed that Tchaikovsky had the large belly of a fortunate man. The composer looked stout and stylish.

He turned the pages of the book as loudly as he could, hoping Ai-ming might emerge, missing her company. The letters of Tchaikovsky were full of banter, he seemed to have several brothers. Here Tchaikovsky was, writing to one brother about the composition of his famous Violin Concerto in D major , Opus 35: “It goes without saying that I would have been able to do nothing without him. He plays it marvellously. When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and I run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it…passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength….”

Sparrow stared down at the page.

Where was the record player? This was a fever pervading his limbs, causing turmoil in his thoughts. He felt such an intense longing for music that he was almost a child again, listening to his mother and Swirl as he waited beneath a teahouse table. And where were Kai’s letters? They were missing from the record sleeve where he normally kept them. For years, he had heard nothing of Kai and then, out of the blue in 1985, as reforms intensified, a letter had gotten through. Only then did he learn that Kai had left the country. In 1978, after visiting Sparrow in Cold Water Ditch, he had crossed the border into Hong Kong where he applied for asylum. Within a year, he had married, left for Canada and had a daughter. The first letters had trickled into Cold Water Ditch, arriving every six months. Now, in Beijing, the letters from Canada came every few weeks. Kai said he no longer played the piano. This turning away from music was impossible to explain, he was haunted by people and events; he felt he had been sleeping all these years. He wanted desperately to return to China, however briefly, but his defection made it impossible. The government refused to grant him a visa. Could Sparrow come and see him in Hong Kong? He had already looked into all the particulars. Kai would wire money that might serve as a guarantee for Sparrow’s exit visa. This detail was entered into the letter as if it were an ordinary passing thought. Sparrow did not comprehend, but the texture of Kai’s writing, the inability to picture either of them in a foreign country, the inability, in truth, to picture the outside world at all, embarrassed him. Sparrow wrote a hesitant reply. And then, last month, Kai had written to him. Long ago, you told me not to turn back but I know now that you were mistaken, I knew it then, Sparrow, but I was too afraid to see it. I was too selfish. And what right did I have to ask you for anything? But Sparrow, the future depends on knowing what we loved and who we have become…Please, if you can, please come to Hong Kong. There are too many things between us. There is a lifetime. I recently learned that the Professor was imprisoned and survived the turmoil. He passed away in 1981. We never reconciled. How could I not know of his death until now?

Even when he tried to remember, it came to him like another life. Love was his devotion to his parents, to Ling, to Ai-ming, to this life. But if this was love, what was the other?

“Ba, what’s wrong?”

Where were the letters? He had looked at them only a few weeks ago, and had left them hidden in the sleeve of a Glenn Gould album.

“What are you doing on the floor?” Ai-ming said.

“I’m looking for the record,” he said.

“What record?”

In the evenings, before the lamps were lit, a person could mistake her for Zhuli. The same querying eyes. The same persistent observation. Leave me, he thought. One day, won’t Zhuli leave me? But the thought shamed him.

“Is it your hands? They’re giving you pain again, aren’t they? Come and sit on the sofa.”

Kai had a daughter, too.

How did a person know, he wondered, what was love and what was a facsimile of it? Did it matter? Was the thing that mattered most the action that one took — or failed to take — in the name of that feeling?

“Tell me what record it is, Ba.”

Those radios outside kept up their warnings. This is a planned conspiracy and chaos. Its essence is to negate the leadership of the Party and the socialist system once and for all .

Ai-ming was kneeling on the floor beside him.

His daughter chose a record. She chose Scarlatti’s Sonatas in D. Sparrow had a sickly desire to crawl into the machine. In 1977, he remembered hearing that, during the Democracy Wall protests, a man his age named Huang Xiang had pasted up a poem he had written during the Cultural Revolution. Throughout the 1970s, as he wrote the poem, he had covered each page in plastic, wrapped it around a candle, then added another layer of wax around it. When the Cultural Revolution ended, he melted the candles and removed all 94 pages of his poem. Was this a real story, Sparrow had wondered, or was it something like the Book of Records, an imagined survival? How was it possible that people of his generation had taken part in such acts and yet these acts remained so desperately hidden? What happened if you melted a person down layer by layer? What if there was nothing between the layers, and nothing at the centre, only quiet?

Grief for Comrade Hu Yaobang is being used to confuse and poison people’s minds .

Yes, he thought. This is what grief does. It is a confusion, perhaps a poison, that breaks us apart until finally we become something new. Or had he been lying to himself? What if he had failed to create someone new?

“Father…”

She put a glass in his hand and he tasted baijiu. How sweet the alcohol was on his tongue, a few quick sips and it might numb his body, thereby releasing him, as in the old saying, “When wine sinks, words swim.”

“Ai-ming,” he said. “No matter what happens, you must write these examinations. You must do well.” University was the only way, he thought, to force open the door.

“Ba,” she said, “it’s not too late for you to go abroad. Don’t you still need to write your music?”

Why did everyone keep mentioning his music? Couldn’t they just let it go? He drank the liquid down, pretending he had not heard her properly. Before the watchful eyes of Ai-ming, he felt exposed. As if the weakness of the times had lodged inside him, slowly pulverizing all that was unique and his alone, because he had allowed it to do so.

To his great relief, Ai-ming stood up and left him.

He sat in front of the record player. The composer inside him had fallen silent because Sparrow had allowed him to do so.